Intel Salt Bay Android phone prototype benched

Over the past year or so Intel shipped around quite a few phone prototypes to its R&D centres around the globe, including Salt Bay and Red Hook Bay devices. Red Hook Bay benchmarks appeared a year ago and the device was Medfield based, but nothing became of it. Medfield was not slow, but it was not very efficient, either. It also lacked LTE support.

However, Salt Bay is a Merrifield test platform and a year later it was its turn to show up in some benchmarks. Italian mobile news site Tutto Android seems to have found a few legit benches, which are encouraging to say the least. There's more. Salt Bay features an XMM7160 modem and supports LTE-A up to 150Mbps.

Salt Bay is powered by a 2.1GHz Merrifield and it runs Android 4.3. It has a 4.3-inch 720p screen and there’s no shortage of GPU muscle. It features new PowerVR SGX 6 series graphics (Rogue) and it scores 56.7 to 58.4 frames per second in NenaMark 2.

The bench does not tell us much for a number of reasons, but then again it is a decent score. Looking at the rest of the spec, performance should not be an issue. However, there is a slight problem – it is unclear whether this is a dual- or quad-core part, although we are fairly confident it is a dual-core due to its relatively high clock.

Now it is time to curb your enthusiasm. This is not an actual product and it is by no means new. Intel shipped a few samples to its R&D centres as far as back as May and it is possible that the samples were ready even before that, but official records show they were shipped from the US on as far back as May 2013.

In addition to the relatively old Red Hook Bay and Salt Bay devices, there is a third phone on the list. It is designated “Intel prototype device VB50” and it runs Android Jelly Bean. Intel also imported heaps of 3G XMM6321 devices and dev boards over the last few months. Interestingly, there were a few XMM7160 devices in the mix, too.